Lost in the Memory Palace | Road Trip
Janet Cardiff: ... I think the way we use binaural audio, the way it accentuates the senses, is much more about philosophical questions – as in how you can really know reality through your senses.Michael Juul Holm: I'm happy to hear you say that, because it confronts this whole idea that there is nothing outside of language; that language precedes perception ... When we talk to each other the transmission of pure language as signs is at a level of 16-40 bits per second, but what is coming into your body of sensual perception is at the level of millions of bits – so how can you ever translate this to that?JC: Yeah, we still have our signifiers for our primitive sensual responses, so if you hear a scratch like here [pointing over her shoulder] it makes you turn your head instinctively – does that relate to when we originally lived in caves, and if you heard a scratch behind you like that it could be a bear? I think that sound still relates to those primitive memories and understandings, and we have these senses for our protection: it's biological. Think of the analogy of being in a space capsule, and you only know reality through sensors ... but what if the sensors are off? So it's all about our perception in relation to reality.George Bures Miller: That's why we love the idea of short-circuiting the senses. In Paradise Institute, where you're looking into this very detailed hyperperspective model of a cinema, listening to binaural audio that was recorded in a real cinema, we are hoping at some point that you forget that you're not actually in a cinema. And when this person says something behind you like "Hey that's good nursing," you turn to see who it was.JC: Or in Road Trip, the slide piece that we are showing ... at one point we are fighting over the order of the slides...GBM: Our voices are coming over two speakers...JC: … and we say on the audio track, well, why don't we just rewind it and re-order it? And everybody knows it's just a slide machine there being directed by two speakers, but they hear it going [the clicks of the slides] and they see the slides on the screen going backwards, so they believe that it's really rewound itself and somehow we have re-ordered the slides. It's very anthropomorphic. We're interested in this idea of how you can take the understanding of how media functions and screw with that.MJH: What's on those slides?GBM: They were slides that my grandfather took. I never met my grandfather but we found all of his slides of landscapes ... it's all about this trip across Canada to New York that he took. At first we were intrigued by the fantastic kind of visual nature, and also how the colours had faded and changed in some of the film – some of the stock got incredibly red because the film was partly destroyed by exposure to light over the years. But it wasn't just the aesthetics, it was also the hidden story of why he made the trip ... he was sick and going to see a doctor in New York.JC: And then the idea came up of trying to track where he was when he took the pictures; we have done the trip across Canada enough to know most of the various locations ... GBM: But we were of course creating a fictitious journey as well – we may call something Lake Superior while in fact maybe it was Lake Huron, but we are kind of tracking this route that we imagined was the route he took. We know there are shots from New York, we know that there are shots from the mountains in Canada, and we are also talking about why he was going to New York.JC: The end shots are really great because he was on a boat ride, obviously around Staten Island shooting the Statue of Liberty ...
GBM: And then at one point you can tell that he changed the film on the boat, 'cause the stock is different, all of a sudden it's much more blue, which is strange – placing yourself in that kind of a modal change in the past. It's like we're playing detectives.JC: It's also very much about the nature of photography, what is it about photography that makes people want to take pictures – at one point, George brings up the fact that just before his father left the family after his parents' divorce, knowing he was going to leave, he started taking all sorts of photographs of the kids. What is it about photography? Perhaps it's about really trying to hold onto something. Like, why did his grandfather take so many shots with no one in them – maybe he knew that he was dying...GBM: Yeah, was it a preservation of this trip or a preservation of something else, something more? These are all fascinating questions about photography. Why do we take all these pictures as tourists? We have more photos now than ever because of the digital photography.JC: But then also, this piece turned into a work about our collaboration and our relationship.GBM: About how we work and how we discuss in a way.JC: What happened was, we thought we would use these slides in a bigger installation, in a completely different installation, so I lined them all up and put them in the projector in the order that I thought they should be in, and then I set up two microphones, and we recorded our dialogue talking about them, thinking that we might use some of it ... and as we were going through it, it was kind of hard for me, because I was pressing 'play' on the remote and I was screwing up, so then George and I started fighting about it. He Excerpt from Michael Juul Holm, "Interview" in Michael Juul Holm and Mette Marcus eds. Louisiana Contemporary: Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2006 Interview